


The Freak and the Geek

by Kizzy



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Bullying, F/F, Getting to Know Each Other, High School, Suicidal Thoughts, Teen Angst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-22
Updated: 2016-03-22
Packaged: 2018-05-28 10:26:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6325342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kizzy/pseuds/Kizzy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alphys is having a hard time at school. Can the girl she met at the dump help her through it?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Freak and the Geek

Tech Club meetings always ran late. Those members who didn’t have to rush off to catch a Puzzlemakers Club meeting usually found themselves chatting enthusiastically about everything from the latest competition to the most fresh-from-the dump movie that was being passed around the Underground. Today, Alphys was showing off the new attachments on her phone.

“Wow, thish ish amashing!” Calleye mumbled through her braces. Half a dozen of her eyes were locked on Alphys with admiration, and the rest were marveling at the phone.

“Ah, w-well, it’s not that much. I just learned this new spell that m-makes more room in something than there actually is. So I w-wanted to try m-making my phone more, uh, useful. It started out with a little compartment to hold some lip balm. Then I. Uh.”

“Got a little carried away?” Opie said, chuckling. Calleye’s brother was holding up the phone with one of his tails, using another to ease a pair of slender plastic sticks out of its top. “Dude, are these chopsticks?”

“Y-yeah! With th-these, y-you’ll never be without eating utensils. I-it’s pretty much a p-perfect system—as long as you, um, r-remember to p-put them b-back. And w-wash them off.” Alphys’ tongue flicked over her buck teeth. “I-I c-can, um, if you want.”

“You can…what?” Opie’s single, echo-flower-blue eye squinted in confusion. Alphys felt a blush covering her entire face and shrunk back in her desk a little.

“Um, s-sorry. I can. Uh. I mean, I can f-fix your phone up, too. If, uh, you want me to.”

“Yeah, sure, if you want.” Opie shrugged and handed the phone to his sister.

“Man, Alph, you gotta teach me how to do this shpell. What, didja combine magic with electronicsh?” Calleye was gently running her paw over the many concealed compartments as she spoke.

“Yeah, I did!” Alphys quickly turned her attention to Calleye. “I’m g-getting really good at that s-sort of thing, actually.” Alphys felt her blush abate a little. She glanced over to Opie, who was digging through his bag for his own phone. “The spell I used is p-part of what they use to st-store the m-materials for the Core that they’re b-building. It’s pretty…um. Fascinating.” Her gaze had trailed away from the siblings in front of her. They quickly turned around to see Cheermera standing in the doorway. The monster’s cheerleader uniform was adapted to allow for the goat’s head on their back to have free reign, but, as usual, she stared blankly and chewed her cud. The monster’s lion head, however, was glaring at them, his nose tossed into the air.

“Ugh, I thought I heard a bunch of trash geeks in here.” They stepped inside, their body lowering into a loose prowl. “Or should I say smelled them?” Cheermera laughed—an oddly harmonious growling, bleating, and rattling. “Opie, what are _you_ doing here? With _them_?”

Opie leaned back in his chair, shrugging. His eyes darted to his sister, and he raised his eyebrows meaningfully. Calleye stepped forward, her iridescent blue-green feathers bristling.

“Get outta here, Mera. Shome people don’t need to drag othersh down to feel good, y’know?”

“Oh, I apologize.” Cheermera sneered. “That _was_ mean of me. All I really wanted was to check out your new... _thing_.” They grappled with Calleye for a brief moment before wresting the phone from her grasp.

“H-hey,” Alphys squeaked. As it often did in Cheermera’s presence, her voice had fled. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Um, b-be c-c-careful!! I-I w-worked, uh, r-really hard on th-that!” She was a little more audible that time. Cheermera simply rolled their eyes and scraped their claw across the screen.

“Ugh, what? It doesn’t even have a touch screen?” They bent the phone back on its hinge. Most people wouldn’t have heard the tiny cracking sound, but the Tech Club members all reached out in unison. When the phone cracked in two, Cheermera blinked in confusion for a moment. Quickly, however, they recovered and scoffed. “Pff, cheap trash. Like the idiot who made it.” They tossed it back to Alphys, who fumbled it. Both pairs of the chimera’s eyes settled on Opie. The lion chuckled. “C’mon, Opie. You don’t have to hang out with these losers if you don’t want to.”

“Uh. Um. I dunno.” Alphys paused as she bent down to pick up the pieces of her phone. She looked at Opie out of the corner of her eye. His cheeks had reddened, and his eye was gleaming dreamily. She felt as though a trapdoor had opened in her chest, and her heart had gone plummeting beneath the stage.

“You should come watch me at cheerleading practice,” Cheermera purred, leaning in close to him. Opie grinned and found himself nodding. Alphys snatched up her phone, barely noticing the chopsticks clattering to the floor as she stumbled toward the door.

*

Alphys was supposed to be babysitting the neighbor kids in an hour, but her feet had glumly trod to her most usual haunt—the dump. Alphys kicked over a dripping bicycle wheel. Trash geek. Yeah, that summed her up. Was that what Opie thought of her, too?

The first meeting of Tech Club that year, he had trailed into the classroom in the wake of his bouncingly enthusiastic sister. He listened politely to the conversations that his sophomore sister and her friends struck up, now and then volunteering the specs on the latest electronic gadgets that had either been reverse-engineered by monsters or retrieved from the dump. Once someone mentioned a sport, however, he was likely to take the opportunity to drone on about the stats he had memorized about his favorite players and the latest matches. Alphys always listened to these one-sided conversations just as politely as he listened to hers. Perhaps a little more politely, if she was honest with herself. He would never catch _her_ making faces while he listed off the Snowdin Snowballs’ achievements.

Alphys tilted her head back to gaze up the gigantic waterfall that fed into the dump. Far, far up, she could see what had mostly been hypothesized as the sky—a tiny sliver of blue. As she peered upward, Alphys noticed an item careen over the edge of the waterfall. The current quickly brought the item crashing to the bottom before it got swept out in front of her. It was a waterlogged cardboard box. The box looked fairly new, even if the writing on it was far too faded to read anymore. Out of habit, Alphys immediately peeled back the soggy cardboard. Inside, she didn't find much. It looked like it may have been a blender at some point. She dug through the pile of parts to see if she could find anything useful, but the box didn't yield more than a few wires. She sighed, stuffed them into her pocket, and settled onto a soft pile of garbage near the edge of the dump. What _wasn't_ trash around here? Certainly not her. Why had she been stupid enough to fall for the one guy in Tech Club who was out of her league? There may have been plenty of monsters at school she’d never have a chance with, but Opie was the only one that actually knew her name.

Alphys stared over the edge. It was a long way down. It seemed like a mirror image of the waterfall that delivered trash down from the surface, but without any sky. What was at the bottom of it all? There was _one_ way she could think of to find out—very quickly, too, she imagined. Alphys tapped her claws on a rock. She wouldn't have to worry about school anymore, certainly. Cheermera wouldn’t pull any more pranks on her. She wouldn’t find her clothes ripped apart once she came back from gym. She wouldn’t have to feel like her heart had been smashed with a sledgehammer every time she saw Opie chatting casually with his flock of attractive, popular friends.

No one would even know she was gone, probably. Well, that wasn't true. Calleye would worry. Bratty and Catty might, too. And her family, of course. Alphys sighed and sagged against a pile of waterlogged magazines. How long would they remember her, though? They'd move on. It wouldn’t be too long before they'd figure out that their lives were the same—no, probably better—without her. Really, in the end, it would be no worse than having a favorite vase fall from its shelf and shatter.

"Dammit, this isn't one either!"

Metal clanged against rock. Alphys startled and looked behind her. Somehow, she hadn’t noticed another monster enter the dump—a girl with wild, bright red hair in torn jeans and a stained tank top. A girl who had just thrust a long piece of metal through a chunk of rock. Alphys shrank back—it would have taken considerable strength to crack the stone around here, much less impale it. She craned her neck up to get a better look at the girl who'd done it.

She looked a little older than Alphys—maybe a year, two at the most—and was considerably taller. With the heavy muscles built on her otherwise slim frame, she could put any of the school athletes to shame. The fine scales that covered her body were a calm blue, but the fins at the sides of her face waved in agitation. Her lips were pulled back into a snarl, revealing a mouth full of sharp, snaggled teeth. Alphys scrambled to her feet. It would be best to just leave. She tried shuffling away, but her movement caught the other girl's eye.

"Hey! You!"

Alphys cringed.

"Uh...yes?"

"What're you doing?" The fish-monster glanced curiously between Alphys and the edge of the waterfall. Alphys scrambled to answer before the newcomer could put the pieces together.

"O-oh! N-nothing. Nothing much, anyway. Just...thinking about how far down this waterfall goes." She gulped. "Um! In a scientific sense! You know, th-there have been a few d-different monsters interested in c-calculating it. P-pachybel said that it was as t-tall as all the Temmies ever, all stacked on top of one another, but he d-didn't really have any reasoning for it b-besides a dream he had once. He tried to use a c-cannon to shoot all the Temmies down to the bottom to start stacking them, but since none of them would volunteer to go first, it just wound up being the fiasco known as Pachybel’s Cannon. S-some more scientific suggestions have tried to measure it, b-but the longest rope they had was twenty-five feet. But! Th-there have been math magicians who have—"

"Mathematicians? Are those, like, morticians for numbers?"

"What? N-no, I s-said math magicians." Alphys shook her head. "Although, I g-guess that a mathematician would probably do something like that." She giggled a little bit. The fish grinned, too. "B-but, anyway! So, math magicians have been throwing bullets down there for decades, c-calculating how deep it is from when they feel their b-bullets hit something at the bottom, and they've only just begun to reach a consensus on how deep it is. Most of them think that it's...um...about a mile down." She glanced over the edge and gulped. The enormity of that distance suddenly filled her mind. There would be plenty of time to regret on the way down. Alphys coughed and fiddled with the hem of her shirt. "S-so, um...yeah."

The other girl nodded, her yellow eyes sliding over Alphys. "That's pretty damn far down. What's at the bottom, anyway?"

"Oh! W-well, no one, um, knows, r-really. It's t-too d-dark to l-look with a telescope or a-anything.” She took a deep breath. “A f-few monsters have wanted to m-mount an expedition to go down there, b-but it's hard to get funding to move deeper underground when everyone just…wants to get to the surface, y'know?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I guess so." The girl shrugged and turned back to the pile of junk she had been sifting through. "So, anyway, I was gonna ask you—you ever see any swords around here?"

"Um. Swords?" Alphys racked her brain for a moment. "Uh, I th-think I've seen a few. B-but the Royal Guard p-pays a lot for any weapons they can get, so I usually j-just hand it over to them. S-saving up for college and all, you know."

"Oh, that makes sense." The fish monster sighed and threw herself onto a nearby box. "Damn, I was really hoping to get a sword. Last week, I got this really neat book, and it had this girl with a sword on the cover. It was soooo cool. I usually fight with spears, but that book just made me want to try out a sword."

"Oh, you...uh, fight?" Alphys started inching away. She couldn't very well be seen with a delinquent. Her crappy reputation at school would tank even faster.

"Well, I'm training to fight." Her chest puffed up. "I'm gonna be in the Royal Guard as soon as I get outta high school. I've been training with the best of the best. Me and Gerson have been sparring since I was, like, this high." She held her hand to her knee to demonstrate. "And last year, I challenged Asgore himself!"

"What? Really?" Alphys gasped, her hands covering her mouth. She looked all over the girl's muscle-bound body, wondering which of the myriad scars had been given to her by Asgore. He might be known as a big softy, but everyone knew that there was a great power behind the façade. "H-how did that go?"

"Uh, not as well as I'd hoped." The girl chuckled and crossed her arms over her chest. "He kicked my butt pretty bad. But then he said that he'd help train me, too! So I've been training with him once a week, and Gerson for pretty much the rest of the week."

"Wow. Th-they'll be happy to have _you_ in the guard." Alphys chuckled.

"Yeah. The recruiters have been fighting over which one of them will get to sign me up." She flashed her sharp grin again before picking herself up and wiping off her ratty jeans. "Well, look, I gotta get going, all right? It's been great talking with you, though. I'm, uh, Undyne, by the way." She jammed a webbed hand out toward Alphys.

"Oh. It's great to meet you. I'm...um, Alphys." She shook the offered hand gingerly.

"Umalfis, huh?"

"N-no! I'm Alphys. Just Alphys."

Undyne laughed and lightly smacked her on the shoulder.

"Yeah, I know. I was just messing with you. " She began to turn away, then paused. “Oh, uh, and if you see any swords or anything, do you think you can bring one by me before selling it off to the guards?”

“Oh…sure. Y-yeah, I can do that.”

“Thanks, bud. I'll see you in school, Alph!”

Alphys watched as Undyne leapt into the water with a loud splash. She had already disappeared into one of the many underwater caves only available to water-dwelling monsters. See her at school? Did Undyne go to school still? Alphys scratched her head. Well, she didn’t know the senior class that well. Those that she did know were either the most popular, so everyone knew them, or nerds like herself that ran in the same circles. Scrappy burnouts like this Undyne just weren’t on her radar. Except that now she was. And Alphys had promised to bring her the next sword she saw. Alphys sighed. With any luck, she _wouldn’t_ find any more swords—that girl was probably bad news.


End file.
